There was a moment of stunned silence in the Sala Grande. Then the audience at the Venice Film Festival rose almost as one and applauded for 25 minutes — the longest standing ovation in the festival’s history. Two nights later, ‘Naza’ carried off the Special Jury Prize, confirming what everyone in the room already sensed: they had watched something that would not be forgotten.
An 80-minute documentary directed by the Israeli film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor — the pair behind the Oscar-winning ‘No Other Land’ — and produced by the Guardian, Naza has since travelled from Venice to Bologna and San Sebastián, gathering acclaim at every stop ahead of its North American premiere in New York. Executive produced by Jonathan Glazer, it arrives carrying the weight of three years of investigative reporting.
The title is a Hebrew military acronym, “nezek agavi” — collateral damage — the number of Palestinian civilians the army expects to kill in a single strike. The film is built around the testimony of 24 anonymous Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers, their faces held in shadow, their voices digitally altered, filmed on the darkened rooftops of Tel Aviv, barely 44 miles from the ruins they helped create.
What they describe is a factory of death. AI systems trawl the phone signals of Gazans, matching call patterns to flag suspected Hamas members, then recommend which apartment blocks to bomb — usually at night, when the targets are home with their families. The programme was known to err in roughly 15% of cases. The strikes went ahead regardless. One benchmark permitted 20 civilians to be killed for a single junior target; for one senior figure, a source says, approval was given for 500.
“The goal was quantity, not quality,” one officer says. Another likens the work to a “video game”. A third recalls hacking a 12-year-old girl’s phone to learn when her father came home, then ordering the strike that killed her.
When Abraham observes that killing 20 people per junior member, across tens of thousands of members, would consume the entire population, a soldier answers simply: “You end up with all of Gaza, yes.”
For a Palestinian audience, the film’s power lies in what it refuses to hide. It puts numbers where names should be, and leaves the viewer to put the names back — the families drinking tea, the babies crying down a phone line, whole lives reduced to data on a screen in a distant city where the traffic drifts by as though nothing were wrong.
The film-makers understood the cost of their work. “It’s not a coincidence that this film is all in the dark,” Abraham says. “We are in a very dark place right now.” He is unsparing about those he interviewed: “They know the house they are bombing is full of children. They can hear babies crying. They still order another strike.” Szor, who holds the camera, prefers to stay unseen. Both knew, after the mob that targeted Abraham’s family home following No Other Land, exactly what awaited them.
That reckoning came quickly. Accepting the prize in Venice, Abraham told the hall: “Our country is doing these crimes.” Within days, Israel’s response had turned the film into a national emergency. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu branded it “intolerable” and pledged legislation to strip citizenship from anyone who “defames” Israeli soldiers.
The culture minister, Miki Zohar, accused the directors of “treason against the state” and vowed to “revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators”. The army’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, promised to use “every tool at our disposal”, and a leak investigation was opened.
The threats did not stay rhetorical. Far-right activists massed outside Szor’s parents’ home calling for the “death penalty for traitors”. A mural in Ashdod depicted both directors in crosshairs, daubed with swastikas. A Channel 14 presenter said the pair should be “hunted” and dismissed the Venice ovation as “25 minutes of antisemitic applause”.
The world answered differently. More than 1,500 Israeli film-makers signed a petition in their defence; rights groups including B’Tselem and Peace Now condemned a response “characteristic of dictatorial regimes”. Ken Loach, Laura Poitras and Nan Goldin spoke out, as did the heads of the Berlin, Locarno and Telluride festivals. In Ashdod, someone painted over the mural, replacing “traitors” with “heroes”.
That single act captures the gap Naza has opened. A room in Venice rose to its feet; a state reached for its lawyers and its mobs. But applause, as one Gazan journalist wrote after the screening, is not safety. The machine on the screen keeps running as the credits roll — and the people it counts as collateral will never sit in the theatres now debating their deaths.
